With objects like these in view it is easy to infer that the onset was pressed with all the vigour at the enemy's command. He had on this section alone nearly 500 guns. These, both supporting and in the intervals between his massed infantry attacks, poured upon the trenches and behind them in order to keep reinforcements at bay, constant squalls of shrapnel. Because less than 5,000 men were here resisting more than 100,000, and continued to resist them all that day and all through the succeeding night, and all through the next day and all through the following night also, and because at the end of that, in truth, indescribable time, though the storm of the hostile guns never ceased, and infantry attack after infantry attack drove forward, only to melt into bloody confusion and wreck before the terrible power of the magazine rifle handled by resolute and veteran soldiers, it must not be supposed that the energy and the ferocity of the enemy were less than both had often before proved to be. The Germans had never fought with greater determination. Their defeat arose from the attempt to ride rough-shod over this apparently feeble line of defence by sheer weight of numbers. The British fought not merely with skill, but with the skill of masters. The Germans, confident in their seemingly crushing strength, fought without patience, and with the clumsiness of amateurs. They aimed at a speedy and a showy triumph. In spite of all their military apparatus and machinery, and of their precision in drill, they fought, in fact, like a mob, and like a mob in such circumstances their losses were frightful. Not only the defects of their military system--its exaltation of the machine, and its depression of the man--were here exposed, but the still worse and superimposed defects of their latest ideas of tactics. Ignoring the realities as distinguished from the mere appearances of modern war, these ideas were the ideas of fantasy. To train men as an army, to employ them in battle as a mob, and, as a result, to look for victory, is of all notions the nearest akin to dementia. A conflict with these odds, and with this outcome has never before occurred in modern war. Nothing like it, indeed, has occurred in war since Leonidas and his Spartans defended the Pass of Thermopylæ. This fight was the Thermopylæ of modern times. It is no fanciful comparison. There was the same heroic devotion and military brilliance on the one side; there was the same use of a vast army as a mob on the other. In spirit and in method the military systems of ancient Persia and of modern Prussia are by no means as far apart as the distance in time might lead us to suppose. The story of these heroes of the British cavalry ought to be remembered as long as in any part of the world there is a man of British stock who cherishes a love for the islands of his origin, and can thrill to the splendours of their story.